


Ghost In The Machine

by AthenasAspis (agentandromeda)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: AI Angel AU, Enemies to Friends, Gen, angel Deserves Better, rhys redemption arc, there will be gayperion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-06-23 14:57:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15608790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentandromeda/pseuds/AthenasAspis
Summary: Angel knew she was going to die.Digital may be the diet soda of immortalities, but it was her only option. She just had the bad luck to end up in the head of a Hyperion stooge on the run.ORAU where Rhys downloads an AI of Angel instead of Handsome Jack.





	1. Chapter 1

This wasn’t how she woke up.

Every day, Angel woke up in a nauseating jolt, fire in her veins and an ever-present sickness in her head, a corruption that only got worse and worse each day. It had reached the point of no return long ago. 

But not today.

It was like she was crawling to the surface, her purchase slipping with every step, trying to pull herself together long enough to fight her way to consciousness. Everything was dark. Confusing images of Helios dashed through her brain, banging on every surface. She tried to slow her breathing and found that, somewhere in the mess, breathing had been lost. It was like she was drowning. 

Her hands slipped, and she fell back into the darkness for a time, a painful half-consciousness.

She woke up for real as if she was rematerializing. It was like the painful tingle after fast-travel, but there was no pain. Her whole body felt odd—numb and barely present. 

Angel looked around. She was not in her cage. A dream, perhaps, but no—every bit of the room stuck out in Technicolor detail. Atlas colors. Long-lost colors.

“Is it a map?” someone asked, and Angel turned in the direction of the voice. There were four other people in the room. She was currently standing between a tall man with a vain haircut—corporate, probably Hyperion—and a woman in a hat—Pandoran. There were three others, an accountant—no other occupation would wear those glasses—a Hyperion Loader Bot, and another Pandoran woman. They were gazing, enraptured at a virtual globe. Angel recognized it immediately from her long forays into Atlas databases.

“This is the Gortys project,” she responded automatically. That was her job, after all, to give information. She assumed that was why she was here, but why would Hyperion be working with two con artists? 

She continued, “it was designed to lead to a Vault.”

The man turned around, saw her, and gave a little yelp of surprise. 

“Sorry if I snuck up on you,” Angel told him. She looked at his vest. Sure enough, there was the Hyperion logo. A handler, then. He would have information. Where was she?

He looked as if he had seen a ghost. Angel frowned. Surely he was here to keep her in check, make sure she didn’t escape on this outing. Why would he be surprised? She decided to test her theory—and her luck. She walked past him and up some stairs to a decimated landing. When she glanced back, he was following, but not at an urgent pace.

“I assume Handsome Jack is nearby,” she said once he had reached her. 

“Uh,” he responded, “Handsome Jack is dead.”

That wasn’t possible.

When Angel had gone to bed that night, he had been very much alive. 

She thought back to the previous day and found that she could not pinpoint it, much less going to sleep. But she would have remembered her father dying. Had she been evacuated to this spot? But no—Hyperion had countless bunkers and contingencies. No need to flee to a dilapidated Atlas relic.

How much time had she lost?

“How long has he been dead,” she asked in a husky whisper.

The man told her. Two years. 

“This isn’t possible,” Angel said anxiously, even through the warm relief that suffused her entire body. “I can’t have lost two years.” She slammed her hands on the balcony railing. They were oddly blue even in the orange light. 

She was panicking now, desperately trying to piece it all together. She had to know. Someone was going to ask her what had happened, and she had to know. People didn’t like it when she didn’t know.

“Ok, ok, calm down,” the Hyperion man said, “maybe I can help you. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I…” Angel trailed off. She didn’t know. Recent memories were a haze; she knew their shape but not their color.

“Who are you?” the man pressed. She turned to him.

“If I’m here,” she told him, “you must know who I am.”

The man shrugged. So he didn’t know. Angel closed her eyes. Something had happened. She had gained her freedom somehow. She latched onto that. Freedom, almost to good to believe. How had she done it?

A thought sprang half-formed to her brain, hazy memories of a plan almost too crazy to work but well within her reach. She looked at her hands again. 

Blue. Unmistakably blue, with the outline of the floor visible through them. So it had worked, whatever plan had undoubtably been visible in concrete form to Angel, the other Angel, the real Angel. To her—the copy, the ghost—it was only snatches of an idea.

She wasn’t Angel. She was the last resort. She took whatever passed for a deep breath to an AI—truly an AI now.

“I am the Guardian Angel of the Vaults,” she told him. “I’m an artificial intelligence.”

“I figured that out, thanks,” the man said. “I’m Rhys.”

“It’s nice to meet you Rhys,” she smiled. 

It wasn’t nice to meet him. Of course she had to get stuck inside someone from Hyperion. She had to do something before he brought her back to Helios and she was trapped again. They’d never let her leave their systems.

“Rhys!” a woman yelled from down below in an unmistakable Pandoran cadence. “Quit foolin’ around and get down here!”

“Coming!” he yelled back. He turned back to her. “That’s Fiona,” he told her. “We’re…working with her and her sister, Sasha.” 

She noticed the “we.” Could mean him and the accountant. Could mean him and Hyperion.

“Why is Hyperion working with Pandorans?” Angel asked him as they descended the stairs.

“Well, Hyperion isn’t, per se—“

“What was that?” one of the women demanded, the one with dreadlocks, goggles around her neck, and body language that telegraphed a willingness to throw a punch or possibly some bullets. Sasha. “Who were you talking to?”

“An AI,” Rhys told her before Angel could say anything. The less people knew about her, the better. Then again, she could probably trust these Pandorans more than anyone from Hyperion. 

The woman raised a scathing eyebrow. 

“She came with the ID drive,” Rhys added, and Angel fervently wished she could punch him. She tried for a slap on the arm, but of course her hand just went right through his shoulder. 

“Don’t do that!” Rhys told her. Angel crossed her arms and waited.

Something low, a whistle in the sky, caught her ear. Familiar. She looked up and saw flames cross above the little hole in the roof. Then, a low thudding boom.

“Moonshots,” Fiona muttered. She turned back to the group and yelled, “Get to the caravan!”

The Loader Bot grabbed the two Hyperion men and whisked them away. Something twisted almost painfully in Angel’s stomach, and suddenly she was beside them as they ran for a Pandoran caravan marked nearby. She followed. She obviously had no choice. Tethered again to a man who would no doubt trap her. Freedom, even if just a taste, snatched away.

But. 

Moonshots. Coming from Helios. Aiming at them. They made no effort to contact Hyperion, tell them to cut off the projectiles whizzing dangerously close. Maybe they weren’t representatives of the company. Maybe they just dressed like it. 

“Don’t you work for these guys?” Fiona demanded. 

More confusing information. Angel’s specialty. She probed the borders of her digital prison, trying to ascertain its shape.

“Yeah, we’ll file a complaint with HR when we get back,” Rhys retorted. “Just drive!”

These four would be a tough nut to crack. They were working together, and didn’t hesitate to go for the same car, but distrust lurked in the air like electricity. 

The moonshots came dangerously close. Rhys got in the driver’s seat, claiming he could dodge them. Angel stood by his side. By now, she had mapped the shape of his cybernetics. She could see, just as he could, a world of blue and orange, moonshot targets highlighted in yellow. He dodged, but just barely, clearly used to driving sleek corporate cars on well-paved roads.

And then the rakk hive showed up. 

Angel felt completely helpless. She could only watch as they beat off rakks with SMGs and a frying pan. A moonshot took off a wheel, and there was nothing she could do. If only she had a body. She could feel the possibility she once had. Her hand on the dashboard and a little bit of energy and the boost would have been fully charged. 

97 percent. 98 percent. Rhys’s hand hovered over the boost as he drove right at a moonshot target. Right at the rakk hive.

Angel realized what he was going to do a second before he did it. So this man was smart, and willing to take risks. And Hyperion, so obviously ambitious, not to mention soulless. A deadly combination. 

But she couldn’t help but cheer as the moonshot eviscerated the rakk hive. Most Hyperion people wouldn’t last two minutes on Pandora. Perhaps these two were the exception.

“Great job, Rhys,” she told him. He put his hand up for a high five, which she shrugged at. She couldn’t reciprocate it. He realized this after a moment, but before he could put his hand back on the steering wheel, he was thrown out of his chair. 

Despite his precarious position clinging to a kitchen appliance, he still threw out his arm without hesitation to catch the accountant. Friends, then. Or perhaps the accountant simply had something Rhys needed.

Angel was pulled along with him when they inevitably fell from the caravan. Rhys knocked his head on the ground, and she felt her mind flicker out to somewhere else. 

His mind. She couldn’t feel her body, just the outline of wires and circuits. It was like all her forays into the ECHOnet, when her awareness was only information. It was static and familiar. 

She came to—they came to—lying on the hot sand. 

“Moonshots. I hadn’t even thought about moonshots,” someone said. It was the accountant, sitting on a dresser that had fallen out of the caravan. “The list of things trying to kill us gets longer and longer.”

“Are you okay?” Angel asked Rhys, who was still lying on the ground. He pushed himself into a sitting position with a grunt. 

“I’ve never felt so alive!” the accountant announced with a laugh, leaping to his feet. 

He had a taste for adventure and danger. That could be good, Angel thought as he expressed his disdain for going back to Hyperion. Or it could be bad. A pencil-pusher with a proclivity for peril could become a megalomaniac rather quickly. 

“That’s the spirit, Vaughn!” Rhys cheered. 

Vaughn shrieked in surprise as Rhys’s echo started ringing, and Angel couldn’t help her giggle. Rhys took the call on his cybernetic arm. 

It was their contact on Helios. It was not good for Angel that they even had a contact on Helios. Their ties were not entirely severed. Yvette was her name, and she was a tad exasperated. 

But she had Angel’s attention when she mentioned Hyperion wanted Rhys intact for something in his head.

Someone in his head, Angel thought, twisting her fingers together. 

Rhys looked at her. She looked back at him and tried to hide the fear in her eyes. Hyperion knew somehow. It shouldn’t have been possible for them to know. They were watching somehow.

“Ask her how they know about me,” she told Rhys.

“Ask her to send supplies!” Vaughn shouted from behind a rock.

“Can you send supplies?” Rhys asked Yvette. 

They were tracking her login ID. Of course they were. Not a single Hyperion employee could ever fall through the cracks. They were property, all of them, as sure as if a barcode and serial number were attached to their jackets. 

Hyperion was omnipotent. Omniscient. Angel had to take a deep breath and remind herself that their omnipotence was actually due to her and her father in large part, and they were both long gone. They weren’t safe, not by a long shot, but she had a chance as long as Rhys turned his back on his employers. If he was smart, he would. She had no idea what he had done to earn Hyperion’s ire, but unless some truly drastic changes had been made since Jack’s death, forgiveness would not be forthcoming. 

Hyperion did not make deals with their enemies. Angel was an enemy now, simply by virtue of daring to exist outside their control.

Good thing she had no desire to make any deals with that bloodthirsty company.

The call was over. Now it was starkly apparent how alone they were. Two Hyperion men and an AI in the middle of a desert. The caravan was long gone. Fiona and Sasha had apparently decided that Rhys and Vaughn weren’t worth going back for, and Angel couldn’t fault them. 

Vaughn emerged from behind the rock. His shirt was now wrapped around his head, and Angel had to do a double take. The man was jacked. 

Rhys apparently thought so too. He stared open-mouthed at Vaughn’s abs for a second too long before making a lame pun. 

Angel saw the shape of something in his eyes. Something she hadn’t seen in years.

“I put an exercise bike in my office,” Vaughn told Rhys. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I had an exercise bike,” Angel commented, “and there’s no way it could give anyone that kind of muscle definition.” 

Rhys gave her an odd look.

“How does an AI use an exercise bike?” he laughed. But it was a genuine question, and Angel froze. 

“Oh, I heard you tell Sasha about that AI,” Vaughn said. “What’s an AI doing in some Hyperion ID chip?”

“You can connect me to his glasses,” Angel told Rhys quickly. “Better than you having to relay everything.”

“Hey, Vaughn, give me your glasses for a sec,” Rhys said. Vaughn obeyed, and Rhys turned to Angel. “Er, how do I do this?” 

“Just use your ECHOsync,” Angel instructed. “You must have done this before.”

“Right. Yeah. Connect to another device. I knew that,” he muttered, turning on the connection. 

Angel retreated back into the digital awareness, where she could feel the cybernetics, the eye and the arm and the port and all the wires in his brain. And there it was, another place. Not large enough to host her, but as long as they were nearby, she could connect to the glasses. She snapped back to the outside world. Vaughn had put the glasses on, and he blinked in surprise as she flickered into view. 

“Hello,” she said with a wave.

“I’m Vaughn,” he responded, seeming a little taken aback. “Man, this is cool! An AI! Where are you from? What corporation made you?”

“Did you used to have a body?” Rhys added as they started walking towards a distant structure that promised shelter from the harsh heat, “ I mean, because your comment on the exercise bike?”

Angel decided on a half-truth.

“I am the Guardian Angel of the Vaults,” she said. “I guide Vault Hunters. I used be a real person, and I made this AI so I could continue my work.”

“You work for Hyperion,” Vaughn continued. It wasn’t a guess. It was a statement of fact, a fact that Angel wasn’t expecting. Last she remembered, no one knew she worked for Hyperion. But Jack had plans in the works, plans that involved using her to destroy his enemies, plans that a megalomaniac wouldn’t have been able to resist bragging about. 

What would they do if they knew the truth?

“Please don’t turn us in,” Rhys asked anxiously. “Hyperion’s going to kill us after we got their ten million dollars destroyed.”

“You destroyed ten million dollars of Hyperion money?” Angel probed.

Rhys and Vaughn told her the story, alternating their sentences with the rhythm of longtime friends. The deal gone wrong, the two con women, the death race, the Atlas base, all of it.

Not just an ordinary pair of stooges, then. Jack had been a stooge with dreams and a taste for revenge. Rhys could have been created in his image.

So, time for the big question. 

“Do you plan on going back to Hyperion?”

“You kidding me?” Rhys snorted. “They’ll kill us.”

“We didn’t really have a plan B,” Vaughn added. “We’re kind of winging it at this point.”

“Hopefully this Gortys thing leads somewhere,” Rhys continued.

Hopefully not, Angel thought. Because the Gortys project would lead to a Vault. A Vault containing an unimaginable treasure Angel had only caught glimpses of through her father’s dangerous brand-induced mutterings. 

He had never been interested in the Vault of the Traveler. It was a treasure too obscure and unpredictable to interest him, not when he had a one-track mind set on revenge and destruction. 

“I think you should just focus on surviving,” Angel told them. “I’m glad you’re not going back to them.”

“Why?” Vaughn asked. “I mean, you’re Handsome Jack’s ace in the hole! Funny,” he continued, turning to Rhys, “that Handsome Jack’s secret weapon would end up in the head of the man who idolized him most out of anyone on Helios.”

“What did you say?” Angel asked, and perhaps Vaughn mistook the ice in her voice for calmness, and maybe he didn’t see her clenched fists and the way she wouldn’t look at Rhys, because he laughed like she was an old friend.

“Oh yeah,” he told her, “Rhys had posters of Handsome Jack all over his desk. He’s always talking about how he wants to be just like him. It’s an obsession.”

“They’re motivational posters!” Rhys protested good-naturedly. “They’re Hyperion-issued!”

She couldn’t take it anymore. Angel rounded on Rhys and was about to punch him before she remembered her intangibility.

“You idolized Handsome Jack?” she seethed through clenched teeth. “You aspired to be a mass murderer? What kind of monster are you?”  
Rhys looked taken aback.

“You worked for him too,” he retorted. “Did a lot more for Hyperion than I did. I was always jealous of you, wanted to be as good a hacker as you were.”

“I didn’t have a choice!” Angel shouted. “He enslaved me! Erased who I was and replaced it with his loyal servant.” Her mind was clear now, that was the advantage of being an AI. She remembered things her old self never could have.

“Every time I tried to escape, he’d drug the fuck—“ God, that felt good to say words formerly forbidden to her—“out of me until I forgot my disobedience and came crawling back. Handsome Jack was a monster, and you Hyperion bloodsuckers—murderers!—are no different!”

She took a deep breath. She had gone too far, revealed too much. She needed them as allies, but too late for that now. 

Not knowing what else to do, she retreated back to the safety of the machines that housed her, allowing the landscape to blink away. 

Code was familiar and comforting, and she wrapped it around her consciousness until she knew Rhys’s cybernetics far better than he ever could. The code felt alive, and not just because she was made of it now. It had always felt that way. Code made sense. It wouldn’t give her mixed messages or manipulate her. And it would always do what she told it to. The one bit of control no one could take from her. 

There would be no sleep, not ever again. But she could come close, drifting away on a wave of logic. Rhys might experience some glitches. She didn’t care.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They get thrown into some dire straits. And of course Angel is the one who has to steer them out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may notice I usually don't use the canon dialogue, or at least not unaltered canon dialogue. This is for three reasons:  
> 1\. a different AI will naturally cause changes in how events go that get more and more drastic over time  
> 2\. it's a hassle to write all that canon dialogue  
> 3\. ....but it's even more boring to read it

Angel was jolted back to the outside world—the “real world”—by a shuddering blow to Rhys’s head. She couldn’t even snatch at some code before she was lying on the desert sand as Rhys scrambled to his feet. She took stock of the situation.

Some sort of car was driving directly towards them. Had just almost hit them, apparently. It pulled up, and the window rolled down, and a smirking bearded face gazed up at them.

“Fancy meeting you two here,” the new guy said. She tried to run a scan, but she didn’t have access to Rhys’s ECHOeye.

“Who is this guy?” she asked. “And why are you two always getting into trouble?"

“Not now,” Rhys hissed. She folded her arms. Hyperion arrogance. Jack would often wave her off in the same way, only to come back to her hours later for her to point out the solution she had seen from the beginning.

The man stepped out of the car. He reeked of Hyperion money, from his tailored suit to his cybernetic pinky to his overly large prototype shotgun.

“He seems to be overcompensating,” she muttered. 

“It’s red, Hugo,” Rhys said in a taunting tone.

While Rhys and Hugo—old enemies, by the looks of it—traded barbs, Angel turned to Vaughn.

“Who is this?” she whispered.

“Assquez,” Vaughn whispered back.

“We had a deal,” Assquez said. “And while I don’t like to go back on a gentleman’s agreement—“

“That’s right,” Vaughn said, “we did have a deal!” 

Rhys looked at Vaughn, shocked. Angel saw betrayal in his eyes. Vaughn gave Rhys an apologetic glance, before continuing,

“You convince me to double-cross my best friend, and the day isn’t even over before you’re double-crossing me?”

“Vaughn, you…” Rhys trailed off.

“Should’ve known better than to trust a snake like you,” Vaughn continued contemptuously. 

Assquez headed off to the car to grab a shirt, muttering something about how Vaughn’s absolutely jacked body made him uncomfortable, a comment to which Angel muttered “gay” under her breath.

“Look,” Vaughn told Rhys, “I swear I wasn’t gonna do it! I was just saying whatever he wanted to hear to get that jerk off our backs! I wasn’t gonna follow through with it. Please believe me!" 

Angel saw in Rhys’s eyes how much he wanted to believe his friend. So maybe Vaughn was the true Hyperion one of the pair. And Vaughn obviously wanted Rhys to believe him. What a friend would want, but also what a double-crosser would want. 

But when he swore he would never betray Rhys, it rang true, even to someone who had heard lies more times than she could count.

“I…” Rhys couldn’t get more words out. It didn’t matter. His eyes gave Angel more information than his words ever could.

“You two need to sort this out later,” Angel hissed. Rhys nodded absentmindedly.

Rhys had not been expecting this betrayal. Betrayals were never unexpected to Hyperion company men. 

More than coworkers, then. These two were more than work friends. Actual friends. Angel almost felt sorry for Rhys, but she also saw the remorse and sincerity etched clear as day on Vaughn’s face. 

Honestly, she would have made that deal too, to keep her friends—if she had any—safe. A deal with the devil. She’d made those before. 

Her thoughts were cut short as Assquez threw a shovel at Vaughn’s feet and another into Rhys’s hands. 

They were digging their own graves. An unbearable badlands cliche for an unbearable badlands planet. This man was a pitiful wannabe of the worst tyrant that ever lived. And he was going to kill them. 

Not if Angel could help it. She had dealt with things far worse than him. She started to probe Rhys’s cybernetics, assessing their possible capabilities that went blocked off by Hyperion.

Rhys threatened Assquez, saying his “dangerous friends” would hunt him down. While Angel didn’t doubt that Fiona and Sasha could kick Assquez’s ass, she doubted they would. 

So they started digging. Rhys and Vaughn exchanged a glance.

“Dig faster,” Assquez ordered. 

“You want me to dig my own grave faster?” Rhys responded with an ironic smirk.

Assquez walked up to him and head butted him, and it sent a shock through whatever passed as a body for Angel. It was static, pain, being shunted from one side of the code to the other. 

So she lived in his head. That was good to know.

It was all she could do to hang on to the real world, not slip into another projection. But she did, knowing that Rhys and Vaughn would need her soon. 

“Ow,” she muttered, “fuck.”

“You got a tough noggin, kid,” Assquez said almost admirably. “Looks so easy in the movies, but…”

You gotta go for the bridge of the nose, her father would have said. Thanks to him, she knew a lot more about how to hurt people than she would ever need. Hopefully.

“Alright, looks like we’re going for the shallow variety of grace,” Assquez announced. “I’ll kill Rhys first, and you can help me load his body into the car.”

“What?” Vaughn demanded incredulously. 

“Yeah, they want this idiot’s body for something, ah, important floating around in his head.”

How did Hyperion know about her?

More important things to worry about as Assquez began to charge up the shotgun.

Angel was acting before she could even think about it. She dove into Rhys’s cybernetics, bypassing the meticulous Hyperion firewalls with barely an afterthought. Deeper subsystem access. Upgraded hacking capabilities. All literally at his fingertips.

So maybe Rhys and Vaughn were Hyperion. Maybe Rhys idolized her tormentor. But that didn’t mean she got to sit by and watch them die when she could do something about it. It didn’t mean they weren’t humans who deserved to live. 

She knew from painful experience that the most dangerous notion a person could adopt was that they had the right to be judge, jury, and executioner.

It only occurred to her once she was done that if Rhys died, so would she. More likely, they would bring her back to Helios and trap her. Even when she realized this, it was an afterthought. Her own survival had become an eyelash long ago, ready to be blown away on the most frivolous of wishes. 

“Rhys, I’ve given you deeper subsystem access. Hack the shotgun!” she demanded urgently, but she was too late, and Assquez was firing and—

Nothing.

The gun had jammed. Angel let out a sigh of relief. 

“Any last words,” Assquez drawled in an attempt to save face.

“Two,” Rhys responded defiantly. “Eat. Shit.”

“He’ll get it working soon,” Angel urged. “You have to do something.”

As Assquez attempted to get the gun working, Rhys opened up his ECHO interface and looked impressed at his new capabilities. 

“Overload the firing barrel,” Angel instructed. “It’ll overheat extremely quickly. He’ll have to drop it or risk third-degree burns.”

“How did you even do that?” Rhys asked her in an admiring tone. Angel did not dignify him with a response.

“Wait a second,” Rhys asked as he probed the gun barrel code, “couldn’t you have just taken control of the arm and done this yourself?”

Angel did not answer this question either. She could have, as in it was within her capabilities. 

But it wasn’t an option. 

The gun went off in Assquez’s hands with a blue wave of electricity. He yelped in surprise and dropped it, waving his hands as if trying to cool them. It wouldn’t help, not in the stuffy and unforgiving Pandoran air.

“Yes!” Angel laughed, pumping her fist in the air. And as she did so, Rhys’s right arm shot up, seemingly of its own accord judging from the nonplussed expression on Rhys’s face.

“Rhys—what—“ Vaughn asked.

“I’m not doing that!” Rhys grunted.

Angel suddenly realized that she was doing that, that she could control his cybernetics. She quickly relinquished the arm with a muttered “sorry.”

“Get in the car!” Angel yelled, but Rhys and Vaughn were already running across the open wastes. Angel looked back helplessly as Assquez got in his car. 

“Idiots!” she screamed, pixelating back beside Rhys as Assquez shouted death threats from his open window. She reached out desperately with Rhys’s ECHO and found someone—something—someone. 

Help, she thought, and that thought was a signal.

Just as Assquez’s car was about to wipe them all from the mortal plane, Loader Bot swooped down and grabbed Rhys and Vaughn in its—his, she had heard the whispers in his circuitry—metal arms. 

“Loader Bot!” Rhys cried in relief. “Man, is it good to see you!”

“I knew Yvette wouldn’t let us down!” Vaughn cheered.

“I missed you,” Loader Bot intoned. 

“I missed you more,” Rhys cooed as Vasquez yelled at them impotently from down below.

They had two options from there: meet Fiona and Sasha in Hollow Point, or proceed directly to Old Haven. Surprisingly, the first thing Rhys said was:

“What do you think, Angel?”

She blinked. She wasn’t used to being the first consultant on matters of strategy. Her methods had too little blood and glory.

“Well,” she began, “there are pros and cons to each, strategically speaking. Judging from how they left you behind, the girls might not be the best allies. However, it’s probably best that you regroup and get some supplies or something before you move on to the next phase of this project. And it’s probably best to travel with some Pandorans, because if you two face any danger alone, you will not make it out alive. No offense.”

And she didn’t want to be stuck alone with the Hyperion guys.

Rhys nodded almost impatiently.

“Yeah, but I mean what’s the right thing to do?”

Angel folded her arms.

“You’re Hyperion,” she snapped. “Why do you care?”

“We should go to Hollow Point,” Vaughn input. “Check on the girls, see about the caravan.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Rhys replied. “We can all go together. Like a family.”

Angel uncrossed her arms. Maybe she had misjudged Vaughn, at least. She could see now little hints that she had missed before, and it was unmistakable that Vaughn softened Rhys’s more bloodthirsty corporate edges. And Vaughn seemed to hold himself differently around Rhys, like he was confident. Valued.

They traded kindness and ambition, and each emerged the richer for it. They made each other better people.

Bad people didn’t generally make others better. 

So Loader Bot started flying towards Hollow Point.

“I’m sorry,” Vaughn shouted over the rushing air, “Ok, I’m sorry! I swear, I only told him I’d sell you out to get Hyperion to leave you alone! I would never betray you, bro! Do you forgive me?”

Rhys nodded. 

“Not even worried about it. I know you’d never betray me.”

He sounded so sure. So confident. Nothing could break their bond.

Vaughn held up a fist.

“Bros?” he asked.

Rhys smiled and knocked fists with him, then Loader Bot. 

“Bros.”

“What was that?” Angel asked. “You two are Hyperion. You don’t just forgive and forget.”

“We’re not like the rest of those assholes,” Vaughn answered her with an expression of disgust. 

“Yeah,” Rhys agreed, “we’re bros.” He looked back at Vaughn with a dorky smile that melted even Angel’s heart a little. 

She’d never been bros with anyone. She wondered what it was like. 

Angel was the one who had to remind Vaughn to put his shirt back on.

—————-

“This place has seen better days,” Rhys announced as they strode into Hollow Point. 

The town was indeed dilapidated at best, with beat-up storefronts and dented doors leering from every alleyway. 

“I’ll say,” Vaughn replied.

“Er,” Rhys muttered, turning in a circle, “how do we find them?”

“The caravan was falling apart,” Angel told him. “They couldn’t have gone anywhere but a mechanic’s. Scooter should have a store here.”

“Scooter?” Vaughn asked.

“He runs the Catch-A-Rides,” Angel replied. She quickly scanned the ECHONet—five shell logins, three proxies, running her access code through a server on Eden-6—and found directions. “Follow me.” 

Rhys and Vaughn talked and laughed as they walked, but they were clearly keenly aware of the dirty looks they drew from every passerby. They could not be more clearly Hyperion, especially with a Hyperion robot in tow. No one liked Hyperion. 

The two friends had an easy rapport that Angel had absolutely no context for. She had monitored countless Hyperion employee interactions. None were like this.

“Hey, Loader Bot, could you fly up and go find the girls?” Rhys asked, and there was another point in his favor. No one asked Loader Bots to do anything. They ordered.

Loader Bot took off, presumably to search the streets for Sasha and Fiona.

Rhys, Vaughn, and Angel kept walking down the main boulevard until Angel spotted a sign sporting the silhouette of a skinny, sexy lady with one toe pointed in the air.

“There,” she said, pointing out the Catch-A-Ride. 

“It better be in there,” Rhys panted. “I’ve walked far too much today.”

“I’ll carry you,” Vaughn offered, and Rhys laughed. Given what Angel had seen of Vaughn’s muscles, she had no doubt he could carry a man with the body mass of a noodle.

They entered the building, and sure enough, the caravan was there. Certainly looking far better than when they had last seen it. But no Sasha and Fiona, just a short man with a baseball cap and grease stains over his whole body, muttering over a clipboard. 

Scooter. Angel let out a minuscule breath of relief. A friendly face, or at least a familiar one. 

She winced, remembering that he would not in fact be a friendly face. He did not take kindly to people who hacked his machines. 

She had burned a lot of bridges that hadn’t even been built yet, creating a perfect little island for herself. 

“Hey, welcome to Scooter’s Catch-A-Ride! What can I do ya for today?” Scooter introduced, setting the clipboard down precariously balanced on a toolbox.

And suddenly, Rhys changed. Angel couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was like he had slipped into a second skin that fit him perfectly. Maybe it was the polished smile, or the hands just casually enough at his sides, but this new Rhys was Hyperion standard, and Angel despised him instantly. Until then, she hadn’t recognized how not Hyperion Rhys and Vaughn really were.

“We’re here to pick up our caravan,” Rhys told him. 

“Your caravan?” Scooter inquired. “This baby right here?”

Rhys nodded in affirmation.

“Well, you two ain’t the two girls that dropped this here old thing off, and I’d know ‘em anywhere, if you know what I mean, ha-ha.”

“Fiona and Sasha are our friends,” Rhys said smoothly. “We’re traveling together. They sent us to pick up the caravan. Just give it over, and we’ll be out of your hair.”

The implicit “or else” hovered like a promise. Angel had heard it so many times it screamed out at her from the empty air in the conversation.

The Hyperion way, however, would not work with Scooter. He stood up to his full height and crossed his arms.

“Now you listen here, you Hyperion sumbitch,” he growled, “I ain’t gettin’ double-crossed in my own shop, ya hear? Now you better get out before my business partner makes you get out. She got the meanest right hook I ever seen.”

“Well, well, well,” someone announced from the doorway, in a tone that implied a hand on a hip, “look who isn’t dead in a desert.”

Angel, Rhys, and Vaughn turned as one to see Fiona, Sasha, and Loader Bot very much alive and well. 

“These your friends?” Scooter asked.

“Friend is a strong word,” Fiona replied. “It’s fine, Scooter. They’re with us.”

“See?” Rhys said, and he was Rhys again now that he wan’t trying to get something, “You can let us in the caravan!”

“I’m glad they’re okay,” Angel remarked.

“Angel’s happy to see you,” Rhys told Fiona and Sasha as they entered the caravan.

“Right,” Sasha said with an eye roll. “Glad to hear we have the approval of your imaginary friend.”

“She’s not imaginary!” Rhys insisted huffily.

“He’s right,” Vaughn added, getting in the drivers seat and immediately getting ejected from the driver’s seat by Sasha, “I can see her too.”

Sasha’s demeanor changed. She was obviously interested, and Angel wasn’t sure if that made her uncomfortable or not. Sasha seemed nice enough. Nice in this context meant not Hyperion and, by extension, not likely to destroy Pandora and/or enslave Angel. 

“Rhys, I’d like to talk to them,” Angel said. “Can I access your ECHO?”

“Uh, yeah,” Rhys responded, seemingly a bit surprised that she was even asking.

It took barely any effort to take over his ECHO, and even less to find Fiona and Sasha’s comms, even though they hadn’t even used them to contact Rhys yet. 

“Hello,” she introduced. No name given, no name needed. 

Fiona jumped like she’d just heard a ghost. Which she sort of had.

“Great,” she drawled, “just great. Because another Hyperion passenger is just what I needed today.”

“I’m not Hyperion,” Angel said calmly. “And I didn’t choose to come along on this ride.”

Mild animosity. Just Fiona’s style.

Sasha started up the caravan. 

“I guess we’re going to Old Haven, then,” she said almost to herself.

“You know, given how many things have tried to kill us today, this better lead us to a Vault,” Vaughn grumbled.

“Are you sure you want to find a Vault?” Angel asked tentatively. She was not tentative, she was driven and would do what she had to to stop them, but they didn’t need to know that.

Fiona looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Angel responded, “I have seen three Vaults be opened. Two contained gigantic monsters. The other created Handsome Jack. Nothing good comes from the Vaults.”

“Aren’t you supposed to guide people to Vaults?” Rhys asked.

Supposed to. Supposed to guide people to Vaults. Supposed to charge the key. Supposed to be a good Siren, a good daughter, a good weapon. She replaced herself with a static projection for a moment so she could flinch from Rhys’s well-meaning words without him noticing. 

“That’s what Handsome Jack made me do,” she answered with unmistakable contempt in her voice. “Though you might idolize him, he was not a good man.”

Rhys opened his mouth to retort, then closed it again. Angel hoped that he knew she was right. She idly wondered if she could read his thoughts and immediately shut that thought down.

“So,” Fiona began, “who are you, exactly? And how did you end up inside this jackass?”

“I am the Guardian Angel,” Angel replied. “I used to be a real person. I created this version of myself to continue my work, and hid it in a Hyperion drive for safekeeping.”

“So you don’t work for Hyperion,” Fiona clarified. Angel shook her head before remembering Fiona couldn’t see her.

“I work for no one.”

“Well, that’s an appropriately ominous note to start our Old Haven road trip,” Rhys quipped. 

“Friends go on road trips,” Fiona growled. “This is a business trip. That’s what it’s called, right? Figured I’d speak your language. Douchebag-ese.”

Angel liked Fiona. A pity they couldn’t high-five.

And then, Angel’s time was devoted to staring out of the windows. The others clearly had no interest in the bland Pandora scenery, just acre upon acre of dust and dirt. But Angel hadn’t had a view like this for years. She drank up any glimpse of the outside like water. Watching the scenery pass, she could almost forget that she was tethered to Rhys and imagine the possibility held in that endless waste. The idea that, outside the walls of the caravan, was miles upon miles upon miles upon miles of open space. Pandora was wild, and it was dangerous, and it was unsafe, and that made it everything Angel had ever wanted.

“Wait a minute,” Sasha said after a few minutes of driving. “Angel, what do you mean, Rhys idolized Handsome Jack?” 

“Vaughn? Do you want to explain?”

Rhys laughed nervously. “Hey, maybe we should go over the plan for when we get to Old Haven—“

“He hung up posters of Handsome Jack in his office,” Vaughn stated.

“Bro!” Rhys hissed. Vaughn shrugged with a bit of a dour expression on his face.

So this was where the tension lay. Of course Vaughn would want Rhys to be better.

“Oh, okay,” Sasha snapped. “So not only is this guy a part of the most bloodthirsty, soul-sucking corporation on Pandora, he idolized the douchiest, evilest man of them all! And why are we working with him again?” This was directed at Fiona.

“Rhys isn’t a bad guy,” Vaughn insisted defensively.

Angel wanted to say something. But she knew that the desire to find a Vault was all that was keeping them together. And if she undermined that too much, Rhys and Vaughn would be on their own. And then they would die.

But how many more deaths would come if this Jack-in-training controlled whatever lurked inside the Vault of the Traveler? Wouldn’t it have been better if Jack had died long before he had even touched that artifact?

It was overwhelming. She had been overwhelmed before, of course, but now all that was in code. She could see her uncertainty spelled out in ones and zeroes before her.

They were dangerously close to yelling now, and Angel didn’t want to intervene.

Sleep again, then. Or the proxy, anyway. They had Fiona and Sasha, they didn’t need her to survive. They would be fine. And being awake to watch Rhys’s posturing, the little tics and turns of phrase all too familiar from a man she knew years ago, a man who died in a Vault—it was too much.

She set her GPS tracker to wake her when they reached Old Haven. She’d awaken then. Or if Rhys suffered a head injury. Given the glares Sasha was shooting him, this seemed likely.

—————-

While Rhys busied himself with tracking down some fuse boxes, Angel walked the streets of Old Haven, straying as far as she could. It had seen better days, undoubtably, but it still held that aura of power, like the Crimson Lance would return any moment. 

Jack had instructed her to keep an eye on this place, like all Atlas operations. Nothing much had happened there until the Vault Hunters showed up and took out—massacred—every Lance soldier in the city.

They had a lot of blood on their hands. By extension, Angel’s hands held that blood, too.

And then the ground was rumbling, and there was the Atlas facility. 

“Whoa!” Rhys cried as it emerged from the ground like a sleeping behemoth. The others stared in shock as it towered above them.

Angel felt afraid in the face of this structure that probably contained countless dangers. She could accept that, and she could set it aside. Fear had become a familiar visitor to her.

The others were excited. Arrogant. Probably not a good sign. But at least they were trying to go in cool.

The first thing they noticed when they entered the facility was the extremely well-defined butt of the giant Atlas statue in the center of the room. The second was the carnage. Armored Lance bodies scattered across the floor, surrounded by violent bloodstains. Judging from the reactions of the occupants of the room that had noses, it smelled pretty bad too. It didn’t take much imagination for Angel to conjure the sensation of tangy blood in her sinuses and nausea in her mouth.

“Who did this?” Fiona asked in a hushed tone.

“Athena,” Angel breathed. 

“Starting to think we may have gotten lucky with her back there,” Fiona said. That raised a whole host of questions on Angel’s part, questions that she was determined to ask later. 

Athena. The one that got away, the Elpis Hunter that had slipped through Handsome Jack’s clutches by virtue of being the only one that saw through his lies and wasn’t Hyperion property. Not even Angel could find her. That failure had caused her a whole lot of pain.

Apparently, Athena hadn’t given up on her quest to destroy the company that had taken everything from her.

Angel could sympathize.

She looked up, imagining she could see the Helios satellite through the roof. If she had the change, she’d bring the whole damn place to the ground. Keep those on Pandora from suffering like she did.

She looked back at Rhys. If she were like Athena, she already would have taken over his subsystems and killed him and Vaughn. 

Perhaps there was a middle ground. She wouldn’t hold revenge in her heart, then. Righteousness. Justice. Those would motivate her.

Some little voice in the back of her head reminded her that was what her father had thought he was fighting for.

Two doors. Defense division and attack division. One for each half of the Gortys project

“Mr. Ten Million dollars,” a snide voice said from behind them. They turned. Some guy with spiky blond hair. Probably Rhys’s enemy. Everyone on this damn planet was. And there was Assquez beside him. Of course.

“How the hell do you keep showing up?” Rhys demanded.

Assquez laughed. “Rhysie, you’ll always be Hyperion property.”

Hyperion property. Long-lost echoes in the back of her mind, memories she wished she’d forget. She had been Hyperion property. Requisitioned for experiments like any Wildlife Preserve lab rat. Unable to escape. Unable to control anything about her own life. And she didn’t wish that on anyone. 

That’s what all the employees were, really. Property. It made her a little less disdainful of Rhys and Vaughn to remember that.

And Assquez had a universal remote. Back to reality. She could override his control over Loader Bot, but she’d need more time, and honestly she wasn’t confident they’d survive an outright firefight. Assquez gloated about hearing them. 

Dammit. How could she have missed it? She dove back into the arm and found it. A tiny bug. It had come with the equipment. Factory issue for all Hyperion “upgrades.” Rhys flinched a little as she destroyed it with a crude electrical overload. Not elegant, but certainly cathartic. 

Angel was surprised, to say the least, when Rhys told Assquez that all of this wasn’t the fault of Fiona, Sasha, and even Vaughn. He wanted Assquez to spare them, not put the blame on them.

What was this man doing at Hyperion if he had a shred of conscience?

She had barely time to think this before Assquez decked Rhys in the face, sending Angel’s consciousness on the fritz.

—————— 

When she came to, they were walking down a corridor, and Assquez was talking about being Handsome Jack’s punching bag with a spring in his step, and—wait, that story was familiar. 

“You’re Wallethead?” she outburst incredulously.

Rhys gave her a questioning look. And of course she couldn’t tell him the truth, how Handsome Jack had told her in a one-sided ramble about Wallethead, the unassuming mailroom man that he would punch in the face every single day. So she settled for the next best thing.

“He got hair plugs,” she told Rhys. “Handsome Jack used to call him Wallethead because he would stick money to his bald head.” 

And of course Rhys capitalized on this, and of course he taunted Assquez, and of course it was just like heated hostile crossfire in a Hyperion boardroom, and of course Angel turned away like she was going to vomit.

“When this is done,” Assquez threatened, “I’m going to save your skin to make a wallet out of so whenever I look at it I can remember your face at this moment.”

“Yikes,” Angel said. “That is on a Handsome Jack level of creepiness.”

Assquez (she still didn’t know his real name, and she honestly didn’t care) nudged Rhys into the room with his pistol. There was a console on the little platform Rhys had stepped on to, with a slot in the shape of his piece of the Gortys core. Rhys slotted it into place. Assquez yelled in surprise as the facility threw up a door between the two men. Angel looked across the massive chamber. Sure enough, there was Fiona, with August locked away behind her.

The room was massive. It was like the inside of a starglobe, with no way to tell how far the darkness extended. The only clue that this wasn’t space was the large viewing window and the two platforms. Which—whoah—were now moving. Towards each other. Rhys stumbled a little. Angel did not. Could not.

“Angel?” Rhys asked warily. “Any idea how we get out of this?”

It took her a few seconds to download the facility’s schematics. 

“There’s a hidden maintenance shaft below the main platform once these two connect,” she told him. She looked up at the viewing window. “But I think your hands are tied when it comes to escape. At least if you want Vaughn to make it out of here.” 

“Okay,” Rhys muttered under his breath as the two platforms slotted into place. “So we wait.” 

Fiona looked considerably less shaken by the preceding events than Rhys. Angel supposed that this was all in a day’s work for a Pandoran con artist.

Two consoles devices on the platforms, clearly designed to slot together. Rhys and Fiona’s dumfounded stares. Two guns pointed at Sasha and Vaughn.

So they started pushing. Vaughn steepled his fingers.

“Program complete,” the Atlas voice announced as the two consoles joined.

And then there was a metal ball.

“The hell is that?” Fiona asked.

“That is a metal ball,” Rhys and Angel said in unison.

Rhys grabbed it, and it dropped. He caught it just before it rolled off the edge of the platform. And then there were bots. Atlas bots. All too familiar. Angel had helped Vault Hunters fight them before.

Assquez banged on the window with his gun. But there were robots in the observation area now.

“Back off!” Fiona yelled at the robots, holding a grenade in her hand.

“What are you doing!” Angel yelled back. “We don’t want to escalate this! Rhys, stop her!”

And of course, because Pandora was a land of escalation, Assquez had one arm wrapped around Vaughn’s chest and another pointing a gun to his head.

Angel was aware that there were wires in Rhys’s head, of course. But she was still surprised when she could suddenly feel the rush of anger that flared up in him at the sight of Vaughn with a gun to his head. A fierce protectiveness, a sort of fire. Not the kind of emotion Hyperion stooges usually felt. And with it was helplessness, a desperate, sick helplessness. Familiar. She had felt it so many times. One time in particular stood out. But she couldn’t put her finger on it, like it was incomplete code. A purple chamber. A white robot. A flash of red hair.

“Let me into your subsytems,” she told Rhys. “I can hack into these drones. We can save your friends!”

In the observation room, Vaughn struggled against Assquez’s grip, nearly wresting himself away, an achievement that would have been surprising for a man of his stature had Angel not seen his absolutely ripped abs. 

“Vaughn!” Rhys cried, the fire in his head, in his chest, spreading to a burn.

“It’s under control, Rhys,” Fiona said. “Trust me.”

“Don’t!” Angel told him. “She’ll get us all killed! Let me help you take over the facility! I helped you escape Assquez once, didn’t I?”

“Back away!” Fiona yelled.

Rhys looked paralyzed. But at last he turned to Angel.

“Do it,” he said.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Events proceed fairly well, all things considered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hoooo boy angel is a lot better than jack at Being A Human

Access. She had control of his arm, his eye, every wire. With her knowledge of the Hyperion language—she had written half of it, after all—it was child’s play to turn basic cybernetics into a weapon capable of bending Atlas tech to its will.

“It’s all you,” she told Rhys. Rhys looked surprised at suddenly being able to feel every potential command nagging at the corner of his brain. He raised his arm, and the robots turned as one to face the observation window, their lights glittering white-blue like the tattoos that had winded over Angel’s arm. She added “recode appearance to hide those tattoos” to her to-do list. Rhys stared dumbly at the robots.

“Rhys, what’s your plan?” she asked softly.

“You mean I’m controlling the drones?” Rhys asked with a tremor in his voice.

“With my help,” she told him. He was giving the orders with his synapses. She was simply making sure the message got across.

“What do I do?” he demanded shakily. 

“If I were you,” Angel replied, “I’d instruct the drones to shoot at the top of the observation window.”

And he did. With a single thought and an imperceptible, almost instinctual movement of his wrist, the drones hit the window with a barrage of bullets.

“We have to get up there,” Fiona cried. “Get us up there! Sasha!”

“I’m working on it,” Rhys growled before Angel could even say anything, summoning the hydraulic arms to lift them to the main room. 

“Sasha! Vaughn!” Fiona yelled as they ascended.

“We can do this,” Angel reassured them. “Sorry, Fiona, but I have a plan.”

“We better get out of here alive,” Fiona grumbled, almost good-naturedly.

They let out a triumphant cry in unison as the digi-glass splintered and the occupants of the main lobby went sprawling across the floor. Vaughn was the first on his feet, jumping away from Assquez to help Sasha up. Not even hesitating. He was adjusting well.

“Everybody freeze!” Angel yelled, forgetting they couldn’t hear her.

“Everyone, hands where I can see them or I sic these drones on you!” Rhys threatened.

“He’s bluffing!” one of the bandits in the back yelled, drawing a pistol. 

Angel sent the schematics and abilities for the smallest drone directly to Rhys’s brain. He understood immediately, sending the drone whizzing over to send a well-placed paralysis dart into the bandit’s chest.

“Anyone else got any objections?” Rhys yelled. 

“Loader Bot, get him!” Assquez growled, brandishing the universal remote. With a flick of Rhys’s fingers, three drones aimed their turrets at his former boss.

“Don’t try it, Assquez.”

Vaughn strode up to Assquez and snatched the remote out of his hand. Vaughn then proceeded to crush it underneath his heel. Loader Bot stood back up and flashed them a thumbs-up. 

Strategy required teamwork. Loader Bot was on the team. Angel accessed his subsystems and, just like that, Loader Bot could see her. He didn’t seem surprised. Maybe that was just part of being a robot. 

“We’re leaving with the Gortys…thing,” Rhys announced to the room. “Stop us and get a bullet in your chest.”

“Like. Hell,” August growled, drawing his gun, and suddenly the room was split with gunfire.

“Oh, crap,” Rhys muttered, diving behind the pedestal. 

“Rhys!” Angel said. “You can do this!”

“Take over the bots,” he told her. “I’ve got an idea to get us out of here.”

Angel closed her eyes for a moment, syncing the code she was made of with the Atlas drones. She assigned the small one with the tranquilizers to Rhys, giving it orders to protect him. She could see through every robot’s eyes, even Loader Bot’s, although she wouldn’t even try to control him. It was dizzying for a few seconds, but she had done things like this before, and it was easier now that she was an AI. The closest Jack could make her get to combat, to hurting people. 

She tried to go for extremities and intimidation, but the bots were imprecise, and she had to remind herself that, on Pandora, it was her or them. Most of the hostiles had taken cover in the corners, giving her associates space to do—whatever it was they were doing.

The great Atlas statue bent at the ankles, then snapped. The world in his hands rolled towards the entrance. Loader Bot scooped up the squad, and Angel pixelated beside them, hovering in the air. Being an AI allowed her to break a lot of rules. The small robot had broken, but a quick scan revealed that Rhys had brought it with him, presumedly to fix it later.

Angel whooped with joy as they swooped out the door. Perhaps if she had been a little less high on victory—if bloody—she would have noticed the rocket launcher earlier.

Her view bucked sickeningly as Rhys’s head hit the ground, but unlike the others she was able to remain upright. She was able to watch as the Gortys metal ball was thrown from Fiona’s hands and rolled away, coming to a stop under the boot of a lady who looked like bad news. 

She ran a quick scan, now able to use Rhys’s ECHO eye. All she found were a few disparate bounties and a name: Vallory. New on the scene or unimportant, then, if Angel didn’t know her. 

“Fiona!” Angel urged as Vallory stalked towards the conwoman, “Get up!”

Angel scanned the rooftops. Snipers. 

Fiona refused Vallory’s helping hand and crossed her arms. Angel turned her attention back to Rhys, trusting him less than Fiona to not say something that would get them all shot. Him and Vaughn were standing uncertainly next to Loader Bot, clearly having made the wise decision to keep their mouths shut.

“With your reputation, I figured you’d keep better company,” Fiona was saying. So she did know Vallory. Perhaps they moved in the same circles. Or knew each other through August, who Angel had just realized was probably the blond.

“I see why you’re Felix’s favorite,” Vallory said. Angel decided she’d just ask Fiona about this later. Rhys’s hand was hovering conspicuously over his stun baton.

“Angel?” Vaughn hissed. “What do we do?”

She shrugged helplessly, trying to reach out to the robots, but most had been crippled by the gunfight, and in her intangible form there wasn’t much else she could do.

And now Vallory was saying she was out ten million dollars. Angel decided it would be counterproductive to hack her ECHO and remind her that it wasn’t even her money.

Assquez and August (presumably) rushed out of the facility. August tried to placate Vallory. So they were working together.

“I just wanna say I had nothing to do with this,” Assquez implored. It occurred to Angel that she should probably find out his real name. She dismissed that thought. 

“Who’s to blame here, Fiona?” Vallory demanded. “I want a name.”

Fiona bit her lip, clearly wracked with indecision.

“Assquez,” Angel told Fiona. “He’s the only guy you can afford to betray at this point.”

And Fiona took her advice. She blamed Vasquez (so that was his name!), saying he’d screwed up the deal. 

Vasquez—actually, no, Assquez was more fitting—was on the defensive, begging for forgiveness. He showed Vallory the metal ball. And maybe they were going to get along, maybe their enemies would ally, maybe their worries would double, and—nope. The shotgun blast echoed through Angel’s ears like a heartbeat. Her fault. She may as well have pulled the trigger that sent all that blood spurting into the air.

“Oh no,” she breathed. Fiona had the decency not to remind her she had no right to contrition.

Vallory tossed the gun to the ground, only to pull another one. Pointed at Fiona’s face along with a threat. A promise. Imminent death.

Angel had known Fiona for a few hours at most. But she had given Angel no reason to distrust her. That made her a friend, a commodity in short supply. Angel summoned every bot she could find, every piece of code she could activate, she even fried Vallory’s scope, but she couldn’t be faster than a speeding bullet.

She didn’t have to be. 

Almost too fast to see, a lady in red was there, dispatching Vallory’s goons with a red blur. Angel recognized her immediately. Athena. 

Protecting Fiona. Which did not jive with what Angel had heard had happened.

August pulled Vallory away.   
“This isn’t over!” the queenpin threatened.

“You’re the ones leaving!” Athena yelled back. “Looks over to me!”

She laid her shield back down by her side.

“Tell me,” the assassin demanded, “are you all just completely stupid!”

Fair question.

“Not all of us,” Fiona replied, looking at Rhys. Angel suppressed a giggle.

“I am here to help you! You idiots!” 

And yet Fiona had said Athena had tried to kill them in Hollow Point. Angel crossed her arms, grateful that they seemed to be out of the fire for the time being. Although if Athena knew that Handsome Jack’s daughter had joined their party, things might get a bit worse. 

Handsome Jack had told the Elpis Vault Hunters about her one night at Moxxi’s, when he had gotten absolutely shitfaced. All he had told them was her name. It wasn’t enough to make the connection, at least without reasonable doubt. But still. Angel was nervous.

“Oh,” Fiona said with a little shrug of her shoulders.

 

Angel joined Rhys by the Gortys ball. He was rolling it over, scanning it for some way to activate it. She looked over at Vaughn, who was poking Assquez’s dead body with a stick.

“Don’t do that!” Sasha yelled at him, and he dropped the stick with a grunt of surprise. Angel pixelated to his side. 

“You okay?” she asked.

“Y-yeah,” he stuttered. “I just—well, I’ve seen dead bodies before, you know? But not like, right in front of me. Like this. And Hyperion’s killed—I’m probably responsible for hundreds of deaths, what with the Eridium mining and—and stuff. I guess I’m just new to all this.”

“You’re adjusting remarkably well,” Angel remarked. Vaughn looked over at Rhys with a little snort.

“Not as well as him,” he said wistfully. 

“I don’t think Rhys is processing any of this,” Angel told him. Vaughn looked back at her.

“You seem completely unfazed,” he said.

After all the experiments and the Eridian fire in her veins, the moonshots and the manipulation, the deaths at her hands and the bodies at her feet, this little misadventure was nothing but a fever dream, especially when, to her, the whole world was immaterial water in her hands. But she wasn’t going to tell Vaughn that.

“I’ve helped people opened Vaults,” she replied. “I’ve seen all Pandora has to offer.”

“And now you’re helping us open a Vault,” Vaughn continued. He gave her a small smile. “I guess that makes us Vault Hunters.”

Not if she could help it. 

“How long have you and Rhys been friends?” she asked.

“Since college,” Vaughn told her. “We were roommates trying to get into the same company, and I guess things sorta went from there. Then we met Yvette and—man, we were unstoppable up at Hyperion! Everyone up there says it’s best to be a lone wolf, try not to get backstabbed, you know, but with me playing the system, Yvette knowing literally everything, and Rhys and his silver tongue…” he chuckled. “We could have run the place. I’m glad we didn’t stay there, though.”

“You are?” Angel inquired.

“Hell yes! Going through stock reports? Trying to figure out who to sabotage next? God, it makes me sick thinking of going back! I really feel like I belong here, you know?”

“Thats good,” Angel told him, and she meant it. Maybe Vaughn was one of the good ones. Maybe he could change. Maybe he already had. 

“I found the on button!” Rhys yelled. 

They all gathered around the metal ball. It rose into the air as a disembodied voice spoke. And then it fell, and…oh man. Angel had never seen a cuter robot.

“Hi, wow, hey!” she said. “Really great to meet you all.”

With a quick twist of code, Gortys could see Angel. 

Gortys greeted them all with wide robot eyes. 

“You can get us a Vault, right?” Fiona asked. 

Oh, no. They were already starting plans to get to the Vault. And they had a robot to help them. A robot that Angel could not possibly harbor ill will toward.

“Everybody up and at em!” Gortys ordered. Angel looked over to find the round little robot tugging at the leg of Assquez’s corpse. 

“Uh, Gortys?” Angel said. Gortys swiveled to look up at her with wide eyes. “He’s not a part of our group,” Angel continued. “He’s…resting.”

Athena looked bewildered. Angel walked up to the Atlas assassin and tapped into her ECHO.

“Er, hi,” she said as they walked to the caravan. “I suppose that I should introduce myself, if we’re traveling together.”

“What the hell?” Athena growled.

“My name is Angel,” she continued. “I’m an artificial intelligence coded by the human Angel—the previous Angel. My original job was to help people find Vaults. Now I guess I’m just along for the ride.”

“You’re not Atlas, are you?” Athena demanded. Of course that would be her first thought, given how quickly the Atlas Corporation had discovered the Vault of the Destroyer. 

“Originally Hyperion,” Angel told her. “Now I work for no one.” God, it was a thrill to say that.

Athena gave a noncommittal grunt as they all piled into the caravan, Loader Bot and Gortys riding on the top.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They arrive at the Atlas facility. Angel knows her way around Atlas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to reversemousetrap for giving me the motivation to actually write this chapter

The journey took a full two weeks. Two weeks stuck in a caravan was certainly a good way to get to know people, and Angel felt like she at least had moderate knowledge of her companions. No casual remark or friendly interaction escaped her notice.

And now they had arrived. 

Atlas facilities were like the corpses of fallen gods, and Angel’s hands had held the sword that felled them. Which made walking among them as a ghost a little ironic.

Despite how decrepit it was, it was beautiful. A vast dome lit from within with a sort of bioluminescence. The rusted metal structure was iridescent under the shimmering aurora in the sky. It was a beautiful night. Plants of many colors were visible through the gates.

Rhys was out of the caravan first, a newly repaired Dumpy trailing behind him.  
“Can’t believe Rhys got that thing working,” Vaughn remarked as he exited.

“I did help,” Angel told him.

“I definitely can believe you got that thing working,” Sasha said. Angel blushed. 

“Hey buddy,” Vaughn addressed Dumpy, “how’s it going?”

Dumpy flew up to his face and gave a distorted scream. Vaughn flinched. So did Angel; she didn’t like electronic screaming.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many plants,” Rhys said.

“Helios had a lot of hedges,” Angel pointed out. “A lot of hedges.”

“Try not to let all the nature scare you, Hyperion,” Athena mocked, and it was unclear whether or not this was supposed to be a joke.

“An unconscionable amount of hedges,” Angel continued.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Sasha said, sounding more apprehensive than awed.

The scenery was beautiful. A path ahead of them wound between glowing mushrooms and brilliant flowers. The cryo mushrooms bathed the leaves in soft blue light. Angel might have been a little more impressed had she not seen literally everything Pandora and Elpis had to offer. She recognized all the plants from watching the Vault Hunters on Elpis. She wondered how Atlas had gotten them to grow here even long after there was nobody else to tend to them. 

Rhys scanned a tree.

Angel quickly added her own knowledge to the entry that he was accessing. He read the note “do not attempt to lick” and gave her a questioning glance.

“Ask Athena about it,” she told him. “She’s got some stories about Handsome Jack’s doppelgänger program.”

Angel wondered where Timothy was now. Last she heard, he was holed up in Triggerlock after narrowly escaping getting airlocked. 

Angel listened to Vaughn insisting he was going to touch a plant. She quickly accessed his glasses to take a look and told him, “it won’t hurt you, but it won’t be pleasant.” Vaughn jerked his hand back.

“Is it cold in here?” Angel asked Rhys. He shrugged.

“Not as much as I was expecting,” he replied. He scanned Sasha. Angel input the text, “please don’t do anything untoward with her while I’m still in your head.”

“W-what?” Rhys stuttered. “N-no, that’s not what I’m—look, okay, yeah, she’s pretty. Really pretty.” On that, they could agree. “But,” he continued, “I’m…interested in someone else.”

Angel raised her eyebrows. Probably someone back on Helios. She didn’t want to disappoint him by reminding him that he’d most likely never see them again.

Rhys scanned Athena.

Angel’s Notes: Worked for Handsome Jack once. Really good at killing bandits and people who work for corporations. Watch yourself. 

Angel’s Notes, addendum: She is super cool

“Hey Athena!” Rhys called. “Angel thinks you’re super cool!”

“I have no context for that,” Athena replied. “Years of conditioning have left me with no way to accept compliments.”

Rhys walked up to Dumpy. Dumpy started screaming. 

Vaughn didn’t look happy. Angel appeared next to him.

“This place is beautiful, right?” 

“I guess,” he replied softly. 

While Rhys walked over to talk with Loader Bot and Gortys, Angel stood in front of Vaughn and tried to look friendly and comforting.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Let’s just find a way into the dome,” he sighed. 

Angel looked up and saw Rhys looking over at them with a pensive little frown. She moved over to the door, about halfway to the limits of her reach.

“Alright, Angel,” she muttered. “You’re smart. You can figure this out.” 

She looked to her right and saw a very prominent lever. She looked in front of the door and saw a lot of rubble. Not exactly a challenging puzzle for her.

She pixelated over to the robots, where Gortys and Loader Bot were discussing how awful Rhys’s tie was. They were completely right. Angel vowed to figure out what was up with his tie at some point.

“Hey, Loader Bot,” she said. 

“Hello, transparent human,” he greeted. Angel smiled. Others (namely, Rhys) may have interpreted this moniker as dismissive, but Angel knew that a specific classification was actually a high regard for a robot to bestow.

“Can you move that rubble, please?” she asked.

“Of course,” he responded. 

Angel looked over at Rhys, about to tell him what she’d accomplished, but he and Vaughn were locked in what looked like a serious and somber conversation. A private one. But she was halfway listening before she knew it. Old habits. 

“Is anyone actually trying to open the gate?” Fiona was asking Athena. Almost flirtatiously. Angel winced in sympathy. She’d better bring up Janey before anything drastically bad happened. 

Back to Rhys and Vaughn. Not physically—whatever that meant these days—but taking in all the input from their devices. 

As Vaughn told the story about the party and talked about his insecurities, Rhys listened with a sad look on his face. And Angel was surprised. How Rhys stayed outside, unwilling to leave Vaughn behind. How he genuinely seemed to care about how Vaughn felt. She felt like she knew them a little better, but also a lot less, because they seemed to be determined to dismantle the context she had built up for them.

When Rhys said “I’m sorry,” he meant it. 

Angel couldn’t help but feel amused when Vaughn talked about how good Rhys was at all things Pandora, just because he played it cool. She’d been paying attention. Rhys’s sole skillset so far was being handsome and dumb luck. Vaughn, meanwhile, was a fighter. Vaughn flinched at dumb things like eyeballs and Dumpy but wouldn’t hesitate to make hard decisions and kill people in combat. 

She’d have to remind him of that sometime. 

It was, however, a little unnerving to hear Rhys mention the riches they hoped to gain from the Gortys core. She couldn’t forget their true motives. 

Loader Bot made a joke. Angel sighed and asked him for permission to patch his joke.exe program. 

“To submit myself to alteration would be to erase myself,” he replied.

“That’s fair,” Angel said. “Just…try not to scare people like that.”

Rhys pulled the lever, and the door slid open. More plants beyond it. And beyond that, the entrance to the great glowing dome. Just an Atlas door with a red button beside it.

“It’s probably locked,” Angel remarked. Fiona pressed the button. The door slid open. “Or not.”

The room beyond was smaller than Angel was expecting. It was clearly a living quarters of some kind, complete with a Quick-Change Station and a coffee machine. There were security cameras with, ironically, barely any security. She quickly used Rhys’s arm to access them and she was in the system within seconds.

“Angel, check for danger,” Athena ordered. 

“On it,” Angel replied. She began the download process. “This will take a few minutes.”

“Anyone need some new gear?” Fiona asked from the Quick-Change Station. “There are still some clothes in this vendor.”

Sasha looked up from the drakefruit she was digging into. Fresh fruit. That was weird. 

Vaughn ended up getting a more durable shirt, while Sasha got three pairs of cheap ECHO contacts. One pair for her, Athena, and Fiona.

“Put these on,” she said. “That way we can see Angel.”

Sasha blinked as Angel came into view in front of her. 

“Wow. You really are a hologram. I guess Rhys doesn’t seem so crazy now.” Sasha looked at her obviously corporate outfit with a little frown. “Hey, you want anything from this station?”

“I can’t wear clothes,” Angel reminded her. 

Sasha had already found a cute coat in the system. 

“This would look great on you,” she sighed. “Too bad.”

Angel scanned the clothing specs and carefully altered her own appearance code stored in Rhys’s cybernetics. There was a little bit of static, and then she was wearing an outfit almost identical to Fiona’s, with the addition of the coat Sasha had picked out.

“Cool,” Sasha admired. “You got good style.”

“Hey, check this out,” Angel said. She did a quick scan of Rhys, and morphed to look exactly like him, even loading up a modulator from some voice samples stored in his arm.

“I’m Rhys,” she said with a pout, “and I’m too busy gelling my beautiful hair to look down to see all you low-class plebeians. I couldn’t anyway. I’m too impossibly tall.”

Sasha doubled over laughing. 

“Hey, are you mocking me over there?” Rhys called.

“Do Fiona next!” Sasha begged.

Angel obliged.

“Hey, there,” she drawled. “I’m Fiona, and I mock Rhys to hide the fact that I’m insanely attracted to him and his robot arm.”

Sasha was leaning on the counter for support as she laughed uncontrollably. Angel couldn’t help smiling and giggling along with her. She wasn’t sure she’d ever done something like this; messing around, uninhibited, making people laugh. It was extremely refreshing.

“Is that what you look like all the time?” Fiona demanded. “I don’t appreciate it.”

Angel turned to her and replied, “only when I’m trying to sell fake Vault Keys to people.”

Now Rhys was laughing. She’d even gotten a few giggles out of Vaughn, and she swore she saw the corners of Athena’s mouth twitch.

“Do Athena!” Rhys said.

“Do not,” Athena growled. “You’ve been too nice to Vaughn.” 

Athena nodded sagely and morphed into a short, slouching accountant. She adopted a slightly gruffer voice than Vaughn’s actual voice and said, “I’m Vaughn, and I may be a humble accountant, but I’m too badass for this planet. I eat skags and badass marauders for breakfast.”

She changed her appearance back to Rhys with a more high-pitched voice and threw herself dramatically over the table.

“Oh, save me, Vaughn, my mighty knight! I’m simply hopeless without you and your absolutely jacked abs!”

Fiona was giggling so hard tears were coming out of her eyes. Vaughn was smiling and laughing now. Rhys was looking more wistful than offended.

“Make Rhys say he likes pineapple on pizza,” Fiona asked.

“I do like pineapple on pizza,” Rhys told her. Athena sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose.

In a blur of pixels, Angel was back to her old look. She smoothed out the experimental dress, making it just a simple back tunic and leggings. Plus the coat from Sasha. 

Something pinged in the corner of her mind. The security camera footage download was complete.

She shuffled through the footage with astonishing speed. Although she no longer had her Siren powers, her brain had always been what allowed her to accomplish what she could. And she found that, just before they entered, someone had scuttled into hiding behind a panel. Her virtual blood ran cold with how light and jovial they’d been just seconds before.

“Gortys,” Angel said quietly, “go under that desk over there.”

“Okay!” she responded cheerily, rolling away to tuck herself under the console. 

Angel appeared to Athena and pointed to where the mystery person was hiding. At the same time, she had Rhys use his arm to get her access to the Atlas system. She started sorting through employee records while Athena stalked over to the panel with her shield raised. 

“Athena?” Fiona asked. “What’s going on?” 

Angel put her finger to her lips. Sasha drew her gun. 

Just as Athena was about to fling the panel aside, a man jumped out from behind it with his hands raised. 

“Don’t kill me,” he begged. 

He was dressed in the clothing of an Atlas scientist, with cracked glasses and receding white hair. In the blink of an eye, Fiona’s derringer was in her hand.

“Who are you?” she growled.

“I-I’m just passing through,” he said. “I’ll be gone in the morning. I’m just staying the night. There is no reason for you to kill me.”

“Ask him where he got those Atlas clothes,” Angel told Rhys.

“Where’d you get those Atlas clothes?”

The man’s eyes shifted from side to side.

“I found them in the Quick-Change Station.”

Angel quickly scanned him and cross-referenced his face with the employee database. Sure enough, there he was. She was on the verge of telling the others he was lying when she remembered that they had with them a woman who would kill anyone Atlas on sight. 

“Ask him where the Gortys core is,” Angel told Fiona. “He’s bound to know this place better than we do.”

Fiona frowned.

“The guy’s been here for, what, a few hours?”

Angel sighed. She wasn’t used to explaining herself like this. Vault Hunters just took her at her word.

“He’s obviously been here longer. Why else would there be fresh fruit?”

Fiona’s eyes lit up. She had information to work on now, and Angel sat on the counter and prepared to watch the con artist do her work. 

The man didn’t give his name, but Angel knew his name was Cassius. Fiona called his bluff after he gave them a sob story about his family and his cat. But he knew where the Gortys chassis was, and where to go to disable its security. All things that Angel verified with the system. Unfortunately, she couldn’t disable the turrets from where she was. They had to go to the security tower.

 

“Angel and I can disable those defenses, easy,” Rhys told Cassius confidently. 

“Not easy,” he replied, “but your best shot.”

Athena recruited Fiona to go with her to get the chassis, and Sasha volunteered to accompany Rhys to the security tower.

“It’s a simple hack,” Rhys told her. “No need to put yourself in danger.”

“You put yourself in danger every time you go outside,” Angel told him. “Accept her protection. I have a feeling you’ll need it.” 

Rhys sighed and begrudgingly agreed, but Angel could tell he was secretly pleased. As was she. Sasha was good company.

Angel went over to Vaughn.

“Keep an eye on this guy,” she muttered. “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but he’s not who he says he is. I don’t think he’s dangerous, but I’m sure you can take him if he tries anything.”

Vaughn smiled. 

“You got it.”

“With a plan like this,” Fiona declared, “what could possibly go wrong?”

Angel winced. A whole lot could go wrong.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They find what they were looking for. They aren't the only ones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is quickly becoming one of my favorite fics to write. Around this point is where I'm officially diverting from established canon; the events of the rest of the fic will not really be parallel to what actually happens in Tales.

Rhys and Sasha made small talk as they walked down the hallway. They talked about how they had seen each other when they first met, and it was clear how much their relationship had grown. They had all grown closer. Funny how peril did that.

“What did you think of us at first, Angel?” Sasha asked.

“Well,” Angel responded, “I thought Rhys and Vaughn were a pair of no-good Hyperion bastards I had to deal with just because I was stuck in Rhys’s head, and I didn’t think you and Fiona cared about anyone except each other.”

Sasha snickered. “Same here.”

“And now?” Rhys inquired.

Angel smiled.

“Well, you guys still don’t know what you’re doing, but you’ve all got good hearts. I can’t wait to see where this adventure takes us.”

“Jury’s still out,” Sasha told him. Rhys scowled at her.

They emerged from the hallway into a vast and verdant landscape full of small floating jellyfish-like creatures glowing with a beautiful multicolored light.

This time, when Sasha said she’d never seen anything like it, she was awestruck by its beauty. She looked right at home here, from her amazed face to the way she easily leaped across the broken bridge.

Rhys, however, was afraid of heights. Angel smiled fondly. He reminded her a lot of another good-hearted Hyperion pet she used to know.

“You guys good?” she asked. “I’ve got some data I need to sort through.”

“Yeah, we’ll be fine,” Rhys told her.

“Ok. Let me know when we get to the security tower.”

With that, Angel retreated into the depths of Rhys’s mind to search through all the data she had gathered. A lot of it was stuff she already knew, but there was plenty of information that had either been too irrelevant for Jack to want to know or had been erased in the transfer from brain to AI. 

With the ever-capable Sasha at his side, Rhys would be fine. She had to learn not to worry so much. 

“Angel!” Rhys called suddenly. “Angel, are you there!”

And suddenly, Angel was by his side by a security console. She looked out the window, where hostile Elpis shock jellyfish were crowding against the window. Athena and Fiona were screaming over the ECHO, with gunfire in the background.

“Rhys, what the hell?” she demanded. “I leave you guys alone for five goddamn minutes…”

“Yeah, okay, we can yell at Rhys later,” Sasha said urgently. “Just shut off the security!”

Rhys pressed his arm against the console. Angel sighed, found the security circuit, and shut it off.

“Yes!” Rhys laughed. “Go Angel!”

And with that, they ran from the room and back onto some sort of elevator, the jellyfish still in pursuit. One of them lunged at Rhys and he fell off the elevator with a cry of surprise. 

“Rhys!” Angel yelled in horror as she stood suspended beside him. He seemed to float through the air as her perception slowed. God. This was gonna hurt.

It was a long way down. Angel lost consciousness for a second. As Rhys’s skull banged against the unforgiving ground, she instinctively reached out for something, anything, a place to retreat as pain rattled through her intangible being, and then there was nothing.

Angel woke up with a gasp. An actual gasp; she felt air rushing back into real, physical lungs, and the sound her breath made was a bit too deep. Her eyes burst open, and Sasha was leaning over her, looking concerned. Very close. Angel felt herself turn red, felt heat in her cheeks, which shouldn’t have been possible to feel.

“Wh—“ Angel started to murmur, and then froze. That was not her voice.

“Rhys!” Sasha said urgently, unmistakably directed at Angel. “Get up, buddy. Jesus, are you okay? That was a long fall.”

Angel pushed herself into a sitting position. Actually pushed, hands against the ground, dirt against the one palm that could feel. She wasn’t used to being this tall.

She was in Rhys’s body, somehow. She hadn’t intended to do that, but when she tried to withdraw back to the cybernetics and give him back control, she couldn’t.

“Rhys?” Sasha asked. She pulled out a flashlight. “Er, okay, don’t blink, I’m gonna shine this into your eyes.”

Angel jerked back with a strangled yelp. No flashlights. No tests. No concussion tests. No response tests. Sasha cupped the back of her head, and Angel instinctively swatted the hand away with Rhys’s metal arm. Sasha hissed in pain. Angel hadn’t meant to hit that hard.

“What the hell, Rhys?” she demanded.

“Sorry, sorry,” Angel stammered. Rhys’s voice was so alien coming out of her mouth. “I’m fine, Sasha. Really.”

She shouldn’t be able to control Rhys like this. It was a new power. A dangerous power. 

They’d be interested. They’d be scared. They’d test it. They’d use it.

“You could have a concussion,” Sasha said, concerned. “And you’re acting pretty weird. I think you need first aid.”

“Nope,” Angel said quickly, standing up. “My, er, cybernetics would tell me if I was hurt.”

“Okay,” Sasha replied, still looking skeptical. She looked around. “Hey, why can’t I see Angel?”

“She sometimes blinks out when my head gets injured.” It was true, but it was still part of a deception. Angel wanted to scream. There had to be a better way to protect herself than lying to her friends. 

Angel didn’t say much on the walk back to the compound. Every pretended word that came out of her mouth came with a sick twist in the bottom of her stomach. 

Despite herself, Angel relished in her reclaimed senses. The whole world seemed so much more vivid. All the new smells and sensations crowded in on her. It was almost too much, but the biodome was so beautiful. The cryo mushrooms smelled sharp, and she could feel their cold aura brush against her skin.

“This place really is amazing,” she murmured. 

“It is,” Sasha agreed, and Angel thought again how well Sasha fit in with the landscape. Especially with the flower in her hair casting a light glow over her face.

Angel, she told herself, stop staring. She really didn’t know how to interact with people in person.

Angel’s chest seized up in panic as they entered the room where the others were gathered. Surely they’d notice. Vaughn would notice. Athena would notice. 

She hung back by the door as Sasha told everyone what happened.

“Rhys’s awfully quiet,” Fiona remarked.

“Yeah, he took a hit to the head,” Sasha told her. 

“It’s an improvement,” Fiona snickered.

“Bro,” Vaughn asked anxiously, walking over to Angel, “are you okay.”

“Fine,” Angel answered quickly. “My head just hurts, that’s all.”

Just as she had feared, Vaughn looked immediately concerned.

“Really, er, bro, I’m fine.”

“You sound possessed.”

Angel winced. 

“Hey,” Vaughn lowered his voice, “where’s Angel? I need to tell her something.”

“She flickered out when I took that hit. What’s wrong?”

Vaughn glanced back and forth, making sure no one was listening.

“That guy? He’s not who he says he is. His name’s Cassius, and he’s an Atlas employee.”

Angel feigned surprise.

“Great job, Vaughn,” she said. “What do we do now?”

“Tell Athena?”

“No,” Angel replied quickly, “she’ll kill him. I’m not—we don’t want to have his death on our hands. Let’s just give Gortys the chassis and leave.”

Vaughn nodded. 

Angel felt something twitch in the back of her skull. Rhys’s skull. She tried again to leave his body, but couldn’t.

“Bro, you good?” Vaughn asked. “You spaced out for a second.”

“I’m fine. Just thinking.”

Vaughn smiled and walked away to inspect the chassis Fiona was proudly presenting to the room at large. The spoils of battle.

Nothing really bad had happened for a while. This made Angel incredibly nervous. 

“Hey, Fiona,” she called. “Go ahead and give Gortys the chassis. I get the feeling we shouldn’t wait around here for too long.”

“Okay, Captain Pandora,” Sasha teased. “Since when do you have a good sense of danger?”

Angel gave Sasha her best approximation of a Rhys scowl. Apparently she did a good job, because Sasha smirked back at her.

“What’s this gonna do?” Fiona asked Gortys.

Gortys shrugged.

“I dunno. But it’s gonna get us closer to the Vault!”

Angel realized that might not have been the best decision. Too late now. Fiona gave Gortys the chassis.

“Cool,” Gortys declared, “I have legs!”

“You are so cute,” Fiona told her. Gortys gave her a digital smile.

Angel felt the hairs raise on the back of her neck. She turned towards the window just in time to see Vallory shouldering a rocket launcher.

“Get down!” she yelled. In the milliseconds before the rocket hit, she had time to wonder how the hell they hadn’t heard the bandits approached. How had Vallory tracked them? 

One side of the room exploded in a cataclysm of metal and glass that rained down on them in glittering shards. Something pounded at Angel’s head from the inside. Rhys was waking up.

If Rhys is in control for this part, Angel realized, he’s going to get everyone killed. 

If I am in control for this part, Angel realized, I am no better than Jack.

Jack was trying to keep people from getting killed, too.

“I’m sorry, Rhys,” Angel muttered, leaping to her feet. “I’m getting your friends out of here.”

Her vision was obscured by dust, but from what Angel could see, no one else was up yet. No one else had an extraordinary pain tolerance born of years of invasive experiments and also being a literal computer program. 

As the dust cleared, Angel realized with sudden panic that only Sasha, Loader Bot and Gortys were still in the rubble of the room. 

“Give us the robot,” Vallory called, “and no one gets hurt.”

“How about you leave,” Angel called back, “and Athena won’t literally kill you.”

A thousand algorithmic plans flashed through her mind. She may not have her Siren powers anymore, but her true strength had always been her intelligence.

Someone flickered into view next to her, an orange specter of Rhys, who was examining his hands in fascination.

"What the hell?” his voice wobbled.

“You don’t want Gortys,” Angel called out to Vallory, ignoring Rhys for now. “The Vault of the Traveler contains nothing but monsters. You’ll die.”

“You can’t fool me,” Vallory replied, readying the rocket launcher for another shot. “You’re not getting away this time.”

“Athena kicked your ass the last time you messed with us,” Angel growled. “How badly do you think she’ll mess you up this time?”

Vallory chuckled.

“We’ve got Athena taken care of,” she assured them.

“Oh, shit,” Rhys’s hands flew to his temple, “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

Sasha crawled across the floor to Gortys and Loader Bot and started whispering to the robots. Several of Vallory’s goons leaped off their truck and began to approach them with guns drawn.

Angel turned to her friends.

“Okay,” she said, “here’s what’s gonna happen. Sasha, take Gortys to where the chassis was stored. Loader Bot, you’re with me. We’re heading back to the security tower.”

“Your plans never work, Rhys,” Sasha said. 

“This one will,” Angel promised. “Please. We don’t have much time. You’re gonna have to trust me.”

“Count of three,” Sasha muttered. “One, two—“

One of the masked figures leaped into the room.

“Run!


End file.
